Brian LavelleBit of a long ramble coming up…
I first heard Steve Hillage in 1983, when I was 11 and before I had any real interest in alternative musics. The curious thing is it was *many* years before I knew the particular song I’d heard was by Hillage.
In 1983, I bought (no doubt with meagre pocket money) a fairly basic graphical adventure for the BBC Micro called Space Adventure. I’ll link to a page about it here. As was the format of the times, the software was on one side of an audio cassette and took several, seemingly endless minutes to load. The label on the data side said something like “Now play the other side”.
And so I did, and revealed there was an audio track: this odd, catchy, pulsing, arpeggiated-synth song with Hillage’s dream-like vocals and fizzing guitar throughout, which lodged in my memory like nothing I’d ever encountered before. That its sound and the mysterious lyrics fit so perfectly with the rather bleak nature of the game itself only made it more exhilarating to my young ears. For years after this, I wondered what the song was. No information about it was given on the cassette: no title, no artist, no hints at all.
The song was These Uncharted Lands, the opening track on Hillage’s 1983 album For To Next, recorded at a time when Hillage and his partner, Miquette Giraudy, were recording using computer-based music production.
When I heard the song again many years later on the For To Next album, I couldn’t quite believe it. I’d been a fan of Gong and Hillage’s music for a few years by this point and to find out that this enigmatic song was by him left me a little dazed, but delighted. It was as though it had always meant to be, that my later discovery of his music had been pre-empted by the universe. It remains one of my favourite songs, and a testament to the ability of a song to lodge forever in the memory.
There’s no real point to this rather self-indulgent post. But perhaps it’s that sometimes music finds you when you most need it, even if you don’t know you need it.
I still feel a delicious shiver run down my spine when Hillage sings “A memory that only men divine / Leave the resting body far behind / Passing through the mirror of all-seeing / A signal flashing on a radar screen”. It takes me back there, 43 years ago, and I am there, the space adventurer playing that game, dying over and over again, and trying again and again. And again once more.
Thank you for reading. Message ends…
#SteveHillage #TheseUnchartedLands #ForToNext #ElectronicMusic #PsychedelicMusic
